Learning – Geoffrey Graham

More bad news for colleges

Google is launching affordable Career Certificates. From Inc.

Although traditional degrees are still deemed necessary in fields like law or medicine, more and more employers have signaled that they no longer view them as a must-have—Apple, IBM, and Google, just to name a few.

So, if you’re an employer or hiring manager, ask yourself:

Is it time to rewrite our own job descriptions, to eliminate the requirement of a four-year degree?
Can we take advantage of educational programs like those offered by Google and other online platforms?
Or, better yet, do we have the resources to design our own online training, to help increase our pool of qualified candidates and simultaneously provide an additional source of revenue for our business?
Remember: Nowadays, it’s all about skills. Not degrees.

College boosters will argue that it is not merely “all about skills” and that “the college experience” matters enormously. This is also what college marketers will argue, and it is true. The relationships you develop, the living on your own(ish), the common bond, the parties, etc. These may not be the features that colleges are selling, but they (and especially and above all, the status associated with the certificate) are the features consumers are buying.

Also, colleges have been the go-to HR filters for big companies for a long time. While PWC, Google, and tech companies in general will be (and have been) quick to open themselves up to degree-less hires with demonstrable skills and/or promising attributes, I can’t imagine larger and more conservative employers abandoning their reliance on colleges for their first round of candidate filtering anytime soon. But even so, I bet that given the choice between two otherwise similar college grads, they’ll choose the one who holds the Google Career Certificate.

I wonder how big a drop in enrollment colleges can suffer before they become insolvent? Is it less than 10%? Covid, a heightened appreciation for getting an ROI on the money and the 4+ years, and the spotlight shining on all the compelling college alternatives (both new and rediscovered)—all of these developments must have college administrators concerned. I suspect the best of them will innovate, adapt, and bring something new and wonderful to the market, and the rest (which will be the majority) will fail.

Ambition, Brutality, and Perseverance in the Khan Dynasty series by Conn Iggulden

The rise and decline of the Mongol Empire

Imagine Game of Thrones, without dragons and zombies, and spanning 100 years of actual history. That’s about the simplest description I can offer for Conn Iggulden’s Khan Dynasty series. The five book historical fiction series begins in the late 1100s with the desperate and brutal childhood of Genghis and ends a century later with the ascendency of his grandson, Kublai.

For the sake of storytelling, Iggulden occasionally departs from the historical record (he informs us in the endnotes where he has done so), but otherwise he painstakingly combines the known historical record with his inferences of what might have happened in the remaining gaps.

Highly recommended.

With the exceptions of civilizations in Africa, Australia, and the Americas, the Mongol Empire affected—either through the existential terror that came from the prospect of being conquered (i.e. Western Europe and South Asia) or from having actually been conquered (everyone else) every civilization. No empire ever grew so fast or ruled so much.

Some quotes from the series:

Courage cannot be left like bones in a bag. It must be brought out and shown the light again and again, growing stronger each time. If you think it will keep for the times you need its you are wrong, It is like any other part of your strength. If you ignore it, the bag will be empty when you need it most.

Book 2

“Genghis did not allow fools to be promoted, and that was a matter of pride for Ho Sa [a conscript, who was initially reluctant and later served enthusiastically]. He rode with the greatest army in the world, as a warrior and a leader. It was no small thing for a man, being trusted.

“How much weight can a man carry without being too slow to fight?” [Reminded me of Eustace Conway‘s quip, “The more you know, the less you carry.”]

Book 3

“We strive and we suffer because we know through those things that we are alive.”

“All that matters is what we do now. We are our only judges…”

Book 4

“Take hold of your life with both hands and crush it to you, my lord. You will not have another in this world.”

If he had learned anything in manhood, it was that it didn’t matter what other people thought of him—even the ones he respected. In the end, he would patch together a life, with its sorry errors and triumphs, just as they had.

Book 5

No worthy goal should come easily, he told himself. Suffering created value.

Somehow, as the years passed, Yao Shu had lost sight of his first ambitions. It was strange how a man could forget himself in the thousand tasks of a day.

Good decisions were never made in anger.

…he would not explain himself to one who would never understand what he was trying to do.

“It matters that we use what we are given, for just our brief time in the sun…. It’s all you can say, when the end comes: ‘I did not waste my time.’ I think that matters. I think it may be all that matters.”

Kid ventures

Like most young people, both my kids enjoy building and creating things, and they often enthusiastically pursue various entrepreneurial projects. In the last few months, they’ve each launched a website featuring very different things.

Dual Blade Games

With dualbladegames.com, my son Alex unveiled his first publicly available video game, Testing Cube. Testing Cube has been called* “the greatest and most exhilarating new game of the last decade.” Check it out and you’ll see why. Keyboard recommended. People have been generous with feedback and if you have any ideas for him, he would enjoy hearing them.

Rhea’s Recipes

Rhea has been baking up a storm for the last year or two and recently decided to start blogging her favorite recipes. S’mores on a stick (above) is her most recent addition and she’s adding new ones all the time. Her meringues are my favorite so far. If you visited the Botanical Garden Lights this holiday season and parked in our neighborhood, you may have walked by Rhea’s dessert stand. If so, you might have been wise enough to buy some of her delectable meringues. The wee desserts were a huge hit, and have been called* “a dazzlingly timeless reinterpretation of a classic favorite.”

Firewood

Alex still finds time to sell firewood to anyone in Ansley Park or Sherwood Forest. He buys it in bulk from a tree care company, splits down the big logs to a good size for fireplaces, and delivers loads one bundle at a time via his bicycle. Rhea has picked up his marketing torch; she spun up a firewood order form and any sales that come via that form earn her a commission. So if you are getting cold this winter and live nearby, you know what to do!

* Called by me.